The folks at Random Design have created yet another computer case mod worth raising a piece of glass to. The MSI Battlecruiser Behemoth has the newest Intel 5820K CPU, the MSI X99A GODLIKE GAMING Motherboard, 32GB of 2666 MHz DDR4 RAM, and an nVidia 780Ti Lightning video card. Random Design is a duo of German artists that create works of art with everything from using photograph, 3D printing, prop making, and other handicraft skills. Other games that have been honored by Random Design include Warhammer 40k and Borderlands.

Missing Translation starts out great. A simplistic score similar to Minecraft and an appealing 16-bit, black and white look helps players focus on the puzzle-solving fundamentals at the heart of the game. The lack of a fleshed out plot forces players to focus strange setting, one that is unfortunately, too barren. Where it falters is in the repetition and relative ease of the puzzles that are meant to move the plot.

The Hangover is the most overrated comedy in recent years -- it’s just not that funny. I didn’t have cable growing up so I watched a lot of PBS as a child. I watched it at all hours of the day which meant I was exposed to British comedy early on. PBS was my nocturnal guardian and she fed me a continuous stream of adult British humor like Red Dwarf, One Foot In The Grave, Keeping Up Appearances, etc. I am not trashing American comedies -- Curb Your Enthusiasm and Arrested Development are the US's saving grace.

Innately fun, difficult and interesting puzzles all wrapped up in a post-apocalyptic, burnt-out visual style. Seems tailor made for touchscreens, so why isn’t it on them already? Fungi apparently tell no stories. At all. That’s kind of a bummer, what’s, like, my motivation, man? Control was intuitive enough, but not a ton of fun with a mouse and keyboard. Just wanted to reach out and touch some fungi, is that 2 much?

Film adaptations of video games have not had the best track record of success. Whether it’s shitty acting, shitty CGI, or just shitty adaptation, I’ve left many a theater with only one desire: medicate until I conveniently forget what I just saw.

Starting on last Thursday I found myself sinking a lot of time into the Star Wars Battlefront beta. The meticulously-detailed battle on Hoth was enough to get my juices flowing and to play that damned mode on that damned map for almost 20 hours. Sure, I tried the other two modes as well, but they didn’t hold my attention quite like Walker Assault mode did. Walker Assault felt a lot like Battlefield’s Rush mode but on Hoth with everything Star Wars and not some amalgamation of a real life war. My time with the game was great, but now that the beta is over, I’m not quite sure how to feel.

If you're still wrestling over the brain-numbingly dope aesthetics of Sony PlayStation's WipEout series, attribute all of that mental anguish to The Designer's Republic. They're the graphic design studio based out of Sheffield, England that essentially gave WipEout that neo-Tokyo futuristic appeal that has persisted for nearly two decades. Those guys made Angelina Jolie look cool in that movie Hackers, so it's only natural they get a hearty amount of love on The Stoned Gamer. According to their website, The Designer's Republic is still around, although you have to email them to check out their design portfolio now. They're probably responsible for elements of our culture we're not even aware of -- like the shape of a Pop Tart, or the invention of Taylor Swift.

The media is always talking about millennials and generational divides, how the millennials live an entirely different kind of existence than the previous generation because of living lives immersed in technology from the start. For those of us that exist on the very fringe of those generational gaps, though, we don’t tend to fit into either category comfortably. There have been articles about this, talking about experiences with early computers and how games like the Oregon Trail helped to define our childhoods by the way of time wasters in the computer lab. Seriously, they used to take us to a room full of old, crappy computers in school and let us play games so that they could check off that we got in computer time on some state mandated checklist.

Halloween wasn’t an integral part of life for Fabian Funez. I asked strangers for candy once -- that'a all I really remember. My mother and father didn’t want to waste too much money on real costumes so they painted my face completely white with black circles around the eyes and mouth. I am not too sure what I was supposed to be, but we ended up looking like forgotten characters from that movie Dead Presidents.

Man, people sure do whine a lot, don’t they? They can also shift their position on a subject on a dime as their emotions fluctuate in real time. People fucking suck. That is what I’ve taken away from my time of visiting Cities: Skylines After Dark and trying to make these goddamned people happy. That’s all that I want. Well, actually, that is a bit of an embellishment on my part. I really don’t care about their happiness, misery or any other personal issues, I just want them to leave me the fuck alone so that I can live out my vision for their fine city. Move in, get an education, get a job, live your life, I don’t care what you do, just move in. Please.

I’ve already made it pretty clear that I’m not entirely enthused about the concept of shelling out another $60 to give Bungie’s Destiny another chance. Destiny “year one” was just kind of a bummer overall. I had some fun with it for a while, as did a lot of my friends, but when the DLC started dropping so did our interest in plowing forward and doing raids and retreads on the Crucible together. Other games came out, our interest diverged and Destiny was in our tail lights. Over the past few weeks Destiny has dominated the thinkspace of the gaming world, heralding “year two” as a vast improvement worthy of a second chance.

When it comes to games I’m one of those people that thinks that one of the best dev teams out there right now is Telltale Games. Born out of the love for those old adventure games but looking to adapt them to the future, Telltale was founded in 2004 by two ex-LucasArts employees after the cancellation of the Sam & Max sequel. While they did eventually release a Sam & Max sequel what kept them afloat were license-driven, episodic adventure games like CSI, Law & Order, Back to the Future and Jurassic Park. The thing is, nothing was really catching on with gamers. Even the return to beloved LucasArts series like Sam & Max and Monkey Island was met with some fanfare, but not much beyond the hardcore fans who were eagerly awaiting those trips down memory lane.

Lisa: The Joyful is the final installment to a stellar series. The absolute best thing about this is the melancholy soundtrack and the ever heartbreaking story. Buddy remains the last female in a world full of morally corrupt men, so she uses her blade to turn them into eunuchs. You must be emotionally stable to play this one, unless you don’t mind the neighbors calling the cops to stop your constant wailing.

In 2013 Sony won over the hearts and minds of gamers everywhere by launching an offensive against Microsoft’s Xbox One for not being about the games. PlayStation was about the games, you see. The PlayStation 4 has handily outsold the Xbox One since then, with Sony living up to its promise with the PlayStation 4. Their handling of the PlayStation Vita, though? Promises were made and Sony failed to deliver, turning the Vita into a glowing paperweight. Sony’s excuse is that the handheld market just isn’t doing well.

my body hasn’t received any nourishment since the release of PES 2016 because the only thing that matters now is this. With passing minutes of play, PES opens a vortex that morphs you into the 12th man on the pitch. What sets PES different is that you feel the mammoth that is football transport itself from your machine to your soul and you will willingly surrender yourself to the best football simulation to date.

Sometimes when planets align, strange occurrences happen in our universe. Perhaps the gravitational pull of a solar system increases, or the magnetic field of an orbiting asteroid belt deteriorates. On October 3-4 at the NOS Events Center inside the XO Gold Cup, the world of cannabis and video games will finally coalesce into the world's first stoned video game tournament, hosted by The Stoned Gamer and our buds at Flytlab.

Part of the grind of playing games is knowing that every fall to brace for the deluge of new releases that are sure to come. Over the past few years it has become easier and easier to predict what will come out each fall; a new Call of Duty, a new Far Cry, a new Assassin’s Creed and so on. Yearly installments have become a tradition, just like ignoring the summer because in the 80’s kids weren’t buying games over the summer break because their parents wanted them to play outside. We as a whole open up our wallets starting in late August and start shelling out for mildly updated games that make big promises but build off of our sense of nostalgia for previous installments to these games. Big sites dole out exemplary ratings for them, we buy them and inevitably love or dislike them, depending on our proclivities to fall on either side of the fence.

Everyone that has ever predicted the end of the world has been wrong up to this point. They’ve come yielding ‘great evidence’ but nothing ever comes that actually wipes us out. And when they’re wrong they just blame it on the Mayans. Sure, blame it on the ancient civilization that can’t defend itself.

One of the greatest ongoing debates in the world of gaming is in regards to DLC and evil, cash-grabbing publishers. In our modern, internet-enabled society the idea of being able to have new, original content for a game that you love delivered right to your home is an idea that if you had told me about twenty years ago I would have been salivating at the very thought of it. Now that our reality involves always-on internet connections, regular patches to help squash out bugs and the ability to purchase and download whatever the hell we please all from the comfort of our couches the game industry has changed. When a new game comes out the asking price is standard at $59.99, but over the past few years the popularity of post-launch DLC and expansions has led to that initial $60 being just the beginning of your wallet’s relationship with your new game. The problem is that most of that content feels like stuff that was withheld from the original game in the first place, not like icing on the cake.

When Destiny was originally announced I’ll admit that I was enthralled. The concept art alone was enough to push me to truly believe that we were all in for something special. Bungie’s Halo series was a landmark for science fiction shooters and while it kind of lost its way when it comes to story, it’s impossible to deny just how important Halo was for gaming. Bungie’s gaming pedigree was a cut above the rest thanks to Halo, which meant that Destiny would, at worst, follow in that tradition. That means that it couldn’t be bad.

I think if we say that we're extremely busy organizing the world's first stoned gaming tournament at the XO Gold Cup on October 3-4 at the NOS Events Center in San Bernardino, CA -- someone out there is going to shoot all of us in the head with a high-impact NERF gun (again).

Last week I played Madden 16 and while it was a good game, I have been engulfed by a sense of shame. It feels as if the spirits of athletic gaming have wrapped me in a blanket made completely of the world’s sadness. No matter what EA does with its Madden series it will never be perfect like ESPN NFL 2K5. You are probably telling yourself that the TECMO Super Bowl games were great and you wouldn’t be wrong. I threw many of my SEGA controllers to the ground and became jubilant over every touchdown in my TECMO days, but even those don’t come close to ESPN NFL 2K5. Not. Even. Close.

There are so many things within our biosphere that attempt to kill us for their own survival. This is the reason why people die of disease; the bacteria spreads and multiplies so that they may live. This fact will either frighten you or make you more resilient, and we hope it’s the latter. You will transform into an individual that possess more character and strength than everyone else. Except for those of us at The Stoned Gamer, you can’t be more interesting than us. We fight for the right to freely smoke your marijuana, meet a higher power, and play videogames without the judgmental looks of those who consider themselves ‘morally better.’

If you haven’t taken a course in physics, or even attempted a physics problem, then you have absolutely starved yourself of the realization that math is everything. Your chair, toothbrush, bong -- it's all math! Mathematics are even so intricate that they don’t apply everywhere. For instance; the laws of physics don’t apply in space. You’d have to learn completely new types of equations in order to get stuff done outside of our atmosphere. You better be grateful that Isaac Newton and Gottfried Leibniz were not eternal beings because I assure you that they would have invented new math courses for you to take during college.

I don’t even like american football but I know when a videogame does the padded sport well. Madden continues it’s juggernaut status in the pigskin sports arena by being the sole creator of football games but by also not becoming complacent with their dominance. NFL 16 gives us fantastic detail to the players I don’t know and has them moving with elegance. Look, everyone else will have this game so just go buy it.

I have been an avid fan of The Simpsons since the moment I could understand what the television was conveying to me. The recent seasons haven’t peaked my interest but seasons 1-12 are animation gold. It’s great to rewatch old episodes and catch jokes that were absolutely meant for adults and not 5-year-olds. The Simpsons produced magic through their shows but a lot of their video games have been very poor. It’s almost as if they were just trying to cash in on the Simpsons name without concern to actual quality of product.

Earlier this week, a beautiful sunny day was quickly disturbed by instant winds; the gusts were so powerful that they launched my garbage pail down the street. Neighbors came out of their homes and all of us stood in the streets completely perplexed with our clothes flapping in the presence of some invisible force. Nobody knew what was going on so all we could assume is that it was a tornado coming. This lasted for about 10 minutes and then it just stopped. Calmness returned. Then the rain came; hard rain pelted the concrete and dirt. The power went out, again. It was the second time in 2 weeks that I spent a day without power. All this went unreported. Nobody cares about little towns in Texas.

Last year I managed to peel myself off my sofa in California to reapply my body to my parent's sofa in Texas for the Christmas holidays. Nothing really changed, aside from the size of the television that was affixed in my frontal vision. The pillows felt a little different, and whenever I opened the refrigerator, there was actually edible food inside instead of condiments that have an entire third-world village of bacteria living on the surface.

Remember when you were a kid and the floor would suddenly turn to lava? This reality applies here. A turn-based game, BJH is all about teaching you how oversized roaches can get in the way of your fate. It isn’t a necessity to suffer on your own as you can co-op with a friend while you argue about ways to solve a puzzle. It’s gaming 101. seriously simplistic, creative, and fun, BJH will make you analyze every move.

I was sitting in my homeroom when my friend pulled out a handful of small blue pills and asked me if I wanted to try some. The fear of overdosing from mystery pills was overshadowed by my curiosity of what it was actually like to do drugs. I managed to swallow two without water and sat in my chair waiting for some euphoria to hit me, but it didn’t come. Honestly, I waited probably five minutes before asking him for three more pills and took those with water. Little to my knowledge, I had just taken 5 pills of Adderall and once it went through the process of dissolving and running through my organism I became Buddha incarnate. Seriously, I was walking down the halls of Sam Rayburn High School telling all of my friends that life gets better, things that cause us great pain are a part of life, and that true enlightenment is never reached. I even thought about going by Siddhartha Gautama -- after this experience I started to smoke weed. I’d like to ask my old D.A.R.E. officers -- what is the real gateway drug?

One of my most precious memories of my MMA fandom was the night I stayed up to watch Mirko CroCop Fillipovic fight two murderers in one night. Cro Cop knocked out an Axe Murderer then beat the tar out of a Babyfaced Man. It was probably 4:00 am as I watched the Croatian Sensation win the 2006 Pride Open-Weight Grand Prix Tournament. Confetti rained from the rafters while Mirko and his team celebrated a lifetime full of hard work that was finally culminated in this one moment -- this was MMA for me; the golden age. It was a moment that could not and cannot be described with mere words, and that is what Pride FC was. An idea manifested as an organization of sheer manliness, skill, and spectacle.

Inspired by the Siege of Sarajevo, This War of Mine gets to your soul by providing you with civilian experiences during times of war. you try to survive the war with your group by scavenging for food and supplies while also keeping an eye out for suicidal mood swings. Venture out too far and a sniper will add you to his death count. It’s brutal that you will open you to the realities of war. you NEED to play this.